Karl Barth is remembered for his critiques of the analogia entis, independent natural theology and Tillich's mixophilosophicotheologia, leading to the common assumption that Barth had a settled, and somewhat hostile, view of philosophy's role in theological investigation: the excision of philosophy from theology, it is supposed, reflects in methodology the antithesis between ‘faith’ and ‘religion’ that Barth expounds in Church Dogmatics I/2 §17. Kenneth Oakes's present work, developed from his Aberdeen doctoral thesis, systematically undermines this view by tracing the development of Barth's thought on the theology-philosophy relation from his earliest pre-dialectical days in Marburg, through the two editions of the commentary on Romans and his Göttingen Dogmatics, culminating in Church Dogmatics and beyond. Oakes concludes that Barth's thought on the relation of philosophy to theology is somewhat less settled than has often been supposed: his affirmation of theology's independence from philosophy (its Selbständigkeit), a concern inherited from his early mentor Herrmann, is ultimately predicated upon the defeat of another Herrmannian principle, that of the radical non-overlapping diastasis of theology from philosophy. In moving beyond Herrmann, therefore, Barth does not simply regress to a Ritschlian shunning of metaphysics as a grubby vestige of natural theology, but presents a logocentric theology of philosophy, which is ultimately also a theology of theology. Barth's primary concern is not to dissociate two human discourses, but to prevent domestication of the Divine Word by human words.
Notwithstanding this central thesis that Barth did not reach a settled account of the relationship between theology and philosophy, Oakes identifies significant points of continuity between the Barth of 1909 and that of 1968. Using the theology-philosophy relation as a heuristic, Oakes holds that Barth's turn away from Herrmann and Rade's so-called ‘liberal theology’ (Herrmann's work having already marked a decisive move against liberal revisionism), to the new theological objectivity that McCormack has termed ‘critical realism’, was not a sudden break achieved with clinical precision as has sometimes been suggested (and, indeed, as Barth himself presented it). Whilst the events of 1914/5 were clearly of dramatic importance to Barth (then the ‘Red Pastor’ of Safenwil), Oakes presents early evidence of Barth's discomfort at Herrmann's tacit truce between Kantian epistemology and Reformed dogmatics, and notes that Barth remains a ‘recovering Herrmannian’ (p. 243) insofar as he depended upon the repetition of ‘a great deal of his formation in nineteenth-century German theology’ (p. 263) to effect the defeat of some of its principles. Ultimately, Oakes finds the ‘description of Barth performing a ‘turn’ or ‘break’ from liberalism as helpful as it is obfuscating’ (p. 252), noting that ‘the burden of proof lies not on those who deny this break, but on those who insist upon it’ (p. 58).
The breadth of the textual panorama selected for detailed examination greatly strengthens Oakes's work, giving a synoptic overview of Barth's theological career. The examination of published and unpublished works drawn from relatively obscure sources deepens the reader's awareness of the evolving character of Barth's dialectical thought: these texts range from Barth's 1910 pastoral catechesis (where, remarkably, we find him introducing confirmands to Kant's categorical imperative) to his post-Church Dogmatics roundtable discussions (where we tend to find a somewhat less polished Barth than we do in print). The exploration of the earlier ‘liberal’ Barth, which draws heavily on primary sources, is particularly incisive and will be of considerable interest to students of Barth, whether they are principally interested in the theology-philosophy relation or not. In addition to his direct engagement with Barth, Oakes offers useful English summaries of several scholarly treatments of Barth's understanding of philosophy that are hitherto untranslated, including useful accounts of Lohmann's 1995 work, as well as earlier studies by Delhougne and Salaquarda.
Throughout, the book's engagement with Barth's texts is embedded within a sensitive and holistic hermeneutic: Oakes recognises that Barth's various treatments of the theology-philosophy relation are not simply resolved around issues of theological epistemology (however central these may seem to the overall shape of Barth's oeuvre), but are rather deeply conditioned by the particular doctrine that provides the immediate context of its treatment. Thus in his handling of the Romans commentaries he resists the temptation to decouple Barth's commentary from the Pauline text, whilst the caution of the Christliche Dogmatik is contextualised by Barth's encounter with Catholicism in Münster.
Any work with such an extensive scope will, of necessity, be highly selective: Oakes's omissions, however, are more indicative of directions for future research than of lacunae that undermine his thesis. Nonetheless, some will wonder whether the discussion of the Anselm book (p. 174) is prematurely truncated, given Barth's own avowals of its significance; likewise, the discussion of Barth's typology of theological responses to Kant (pp. 143–4) could be enriched by the addition of a ‘fourth way’ evident in the Hegel chapter. A treatment of Church Dogmatics II/1 would also have been particularly interesting, given that it contains Barth's efforts to formulate an anti-nominalist doctrine of the divine perfections (placing the usually Platonic Barth closer to Aristotelian hexis proaireteke); nonetheless, this omission is explicitly justified in the text (p. 194).
The reader is left with a more accurate, if less straightforward, picture of Barth's understanding of the theology-philosophy relation; integrating Barth's more trenchant moments into Oakes's bigger picture will dissipate much of their sting for more philosophically inclined theologians. Nonetheless, we may be left wondering whether Barth wanted to have his cake and eat it too, to reap the fruits of philosophy without yielding to it any interrogative power. Notably omnipresent in the book's discussions are Barth's efforts to grapple with the legacy of Immanuel Kant: whilst Barth refuses to embrace Kant as the ‘official philosopher of protestantism’ (p. 246) or accept a human a priori to revelation, he continued to speak admiringly of Kant and his epistemological limitation of reason. Oakes's work, therefore, is an important reminder that Barth is a thoroughly modern thinker, and that in going beyond Kant he does not attempt to revert to pre-modern modes of thought.
